Quotes About Startups

Israel has incredible entrepreneurial spirit and a deep bench of technology talent.

80 percent of founders are forced out of their companies by their venture capital investors

Entrepreneurs are usually really creative people, which is awesome when you have to write an entire album or thirty-five marketing e-mails, but can be a menace when you're starting a business. I guarantee you, the moment you get a great idea for a business and start working on it, you'll get awesome ideas for several others. If you split your attention and try to pursue more than one at once, you're screwed.

Technological advances (like the Internet) used to start in government and then migrate to the commercial sector.52 Now that process is reversed, with breakthroughs coming from large companies like Google and Nvidia and from startups like Ginko Bioworks and Dataminr.

Every weekend I would take a train to Delhi and sneak into startup events. I really enjoyed meeting entrepreneurs who were solving big problems. They were way smarter than me. I knew this is where I had to be.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

Startup India is welcome for the economy, but it cannot be accompanied by 'Shut Up India' in society. What gives Startup India its strength is freedom of expression, thought, and dissent. You choke this, and you choke entrepreneurship.

Recessions are the best time to start a company. Companies fail. Others hold back capital. If you are willing to do the preparation and work, it is the best time to invest in yourself and start a business.

We have to develop the whole system of early stage investors and a tax system around it. For every Google that has come on the scene, there are hundred entrepreneurs who never did.

The problem for new businesses isn't corporate taxes. Anyone who has actually started a new business knows you don't make enough money for years to pay any meaningful tax on it.

Team sports is the best for bonding. These sports lessons are also true for startups. You want to be at the top of every endeavour, but you win some and you lose some. As a team, however, you always pump each other up and move forward.

Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.

This will rule out working in groups larger than a handful of people—above a certain number, political considerations inevitably rise to the surface. This means working for yourself or on very small startups.

I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever - no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights - for the smallest companies that are trying to get off the ground, in order to give them a chance.

A lot of entrepreneurs hate big companies. But if you hate them so much, why are you trying to build a new one? The truth is, as soon as a startup has any kind of success whatsoever, it will face big company problems.

In Europe, there is a lower instance of startups because there's a permanent fear of failure. Everyone fears failure because it is this permanent black mark against your name, whereas in the U.S., failure seems to be par for the course.

I hear so many startups talking about how they can raise VC instead of questioning whether they need it in the first place.

Finding entrepreneurs from diverse and international backgrounds is a top priority for us at Y Combinator.

Kai-Fu's Innovation Works is the top very-early-stage fund in China. We are proud to be an investor, and hope that IW will help to produce in China companies on the scale of Facebook, Zynga, or Groupon.

Israel produces more conceptual products than any other country.

The best companies are the ones that offer their products for free.

Think about all of the non-entrepreneurial advice and resources you need when building a company. You need lawyers, accountants, financial experts.

Companies that acquire startups for their intellectual property, teams, or product lines are acquiring startups that are searching for a business model. If they acquire later stage companies who already have users/customers and/or a predictable revenue stream, they are acquiring companies that are executing.

A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.